The Civil War lies on us like a sleeping dragon
I've been on the planet for over seven decades. I was a teen during the Second Red Scare of communism in the 1950s. I lost a brother in the Vietnam War, and visited President and Mrs. Reagan at the White House before he delivered a death blow to the Cold War by toppling the Berlin Wall 30 years ago.
Through all those decades, I've watched our nation become more and more divided, and I'm more concerned about it today than ever before. Liberal progressives blame President Trump for the divisiveness, but they are at the very least equally to blame in their revengeful reciprocity. I wrote articles about even former President Obama's particular prowess and personality for inciting strategic division. Divisiveness isn't new, but it is increasing.
Today, most mainstream media and pundits are more polarized than Santa's new home at the South Pole. The First Amendment has turned into a license for cruelty, or its been completely ignored and replaced with stifling hate language laws. Free speech and blogging have morphed to vitriol and vengeance. And younger generations are watching and mirroring what they see, as even they increasingly take up arms against their peers – and we wonder why?
And consider the polarities in Washington, D.C., right now as congressional Democrats try to find the grounds to impeach President Trump. Have you ever seen such a dismal, disunified three-ring circus in all of your life?
The State of our Union as far as civility is not good. The truth is our nation hasn't been this divided since the Civil War, or before the Civil War. In fact, for any history buff, these days are reminiscent of those years prior to 1861, when politics were polarized, paranoia was commonplace, and conspiracy theories ran rampant. There were many parallel schisms to our time but just packaged differently.
To support my premise, I must cite at length Dr. David Blight, professor of American history at Yale University and author of "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory." His commentary struck me with a sense of foreboding. Consider his summary of the parallels then and now:
All parallels are unsteady or untrustworthy. But the present is always embedded in the past. The 1850s, the fateful decade that led to the civil war, has many instructive lessons for us. Definitions of American nationalism, of just who was a true American, were in constant debate. After the Great Hunger in Ireland the U.S. experienced an unprecedented immigration wave between 1845 and the mid-1850s, prompting a rapid and powerful rise of nativism. Irish and German Catholics were unwelcome and worse. The Mexican-American war of 1846-48, the nation's first expansionist foreign conflict, stimulated an explosive political struggle over the expansion of slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 caused a wave of "refugee" former slaves escaping the northern states into Canada, as well as a widespread crisis over violent rescues of fugitive slaves. Indeed, the constant flight of slaves from the South to free states was, in effect, America's first great refugee crisis. The abolition movement, the country's prototypical reform crusade, became increasingly politicized as it became more radical, extra-legal, and violent.
At every turn in that decade, Americans had to ask whether their institutions would last. The two major political parties, the Whigs and Democrats, either disintegrated or broke into sectional parts, north and south, over slavery. Third parties suddenly emerged with success like no other time in our history. First the Know-Nothings, or American party, whose xenophobia and anti-Catholicism got them elected in droves in New England in the early 1850s. And the most successful third party in our history, the Republicans, were born in direct resistance to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, championed by Democrats, and which opened up the western territories to the perpetual expansion of slavery. A succession of weak and pro-slavery presidents from 1844 through 1860 either tarnished the institution of the presidency or deepened the sectional and partisan divide.
In 1857, the Supreme Court weighed in by declaring in Dred Scott v. Sandford that blacks were not and could never be citizens of the U.S. They had, wrote Chief Justice Roger B Taney, "for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order … so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." This most notorious court decision legally opened up all of the west, and for that matter, all of the north to the presence of slavery. So discredited was the supreme court among many northerners in the wake of the decision that the Republicans made resistance to the judiciary a rallying cry of their political insurgency. That impulse led to the election of Lincoln in 1860, interpreted by most southern slaveholders, who firmly controlled that region's politics, as the primary impulse to secede from the union. They believed they could not co-exist in a nation now led by a political organization devoted to their destruction.
By the time of the sectionalized and polarized election of 1860, conducted in a climate of violence and danger caused by John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, north and south had developed broad-based mutual conspiracy theories of each other. They did so through a thriving and highly partisan press, in both daily and weekly newspapers. Both sides tended to have their own sets of facts and their own conceptions of both history and the constitution.
There's more that could be quoted from Dr. Blight, but doesn't his above commentary sound and feel eerily familiar to today?
He concluded: "The Civil War lies on us like a sleeping dragon." It is America's deadly divide, and it has returned.
We are concerned for the spark that sets off a Middle East World War III. Maybe we should be equally concerned for the spark that sets off a Second Civil War in our own country. Maybe we should read the tea leaves of polarity and return to a more civil time. Most Americans used to be able to agree to disagree agreeably. Now, there is little tolerance and love if any for opposition, but only encampments that raise the bar of their righteousness over others.
I don't think it is coincidence that we are commemorating the 156th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address by President Abraham Lincoln (Nov. 19) on the eve before the day when Congressional Democrats are about to bring to the stand their kingpin witness, Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union who Democrats say had a starring role in President Trump's anti-Biden crusade in Ukraine. What are the odds the 156th anniversary of President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address falls during this week of pinnacle impeachment testimonies? Are the words of Lincoln crying out from the grave to our divided union?
As congressional division reaches its zenith this week, I think it's a perfect time to reflect again upon those poignant words for a fractured hurting nation from the Great Unifier Abraham Lincoln.
Before I cite his words, however, I just want to say that we are so geared for divisiveness in these modern times that I bet my mere mention of Lincoln's name sparked some debate in the minds of many of my readers, as some find him a saint while others a sinner. I even have a few issues with President Lincoln, but that doesn't stop me from seeing what he contributed to bring unity to our fractured warring union. True, his Gettysburg Address was criticized and has not always been well received by many, but in it lie the seeds of civility and a powerful reminder for learning the lessons of history and division before it's too late and more lives are lost over passionate opinions and convictions.
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address still send chills up my spine when I consider the utter carnage that occurred on that great Civil War battlefield. Over the course of three days, more than 45,000 men were killed, injured, captured or went missing. Regardless of what version or copy of the Address you accept as most accurate, consider again this powerful speech that contained only 10 sentences in length and totaled 272 words.
On Nov. 19, 1863, at the official dedication ceremony for the National Cemetery of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, on the site of one of the bloodiest and most decisive battles of the Civil War, Lincoln said these words:
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
As history.com concluded: "Though he was not the featured orator that day, Lincoln's brief address would be remembered as one of the most important speeches in American history. In it, he invoked the principles of human equality contained in the Declaration of Independence and connected the sacrifices of the Civil War with the desire for 'a new birth of freedom,' as well as the all-important preservation of the Union created in 1776 and its ideal of self-government."
Wouldn't we, our families, communities, states and even government be so much better off to focus upon "principles of human equality," "a new birth of freedom" based upon everyone's sacrifices, and the "all-important preservation of the union" instead of focusing on partisan extremes and differences? Wouldn't we be more unified if "we the living" did as Lincoln said to dedicate ourselves "to their unfinished work" and "from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain"?
Whatever you think of her politics, Jo Cox, a British Labour Party politician, hit the proverbial nail on the head for Brits as well as Americans: "We have far more in common than that divides us." And maybe it's high time we start acting like it.
Friends, I am deeply concerned about the escalations of extreme partisanship and divisiveness in our country. I am also deeply concerned that if we forget the past, don't quickly learn from it and refocus our attention on things that unite us rather than divide us, we might sooner than later hit the point of no return. Are we there already?
As writer and philosopher George Santayana put it: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
The post The Civil War lies on us like a sleeping dragon appeared first on WND.